How to install a firework LED light
A firework light is a hub with flexible arms radiating out of it. Before you plan anything, find out which kind of arm you have — the two builds on the market look similar in a listing photograph and take completely different fixings.
Which build do you have?
Unlit, the structure is easy to read: one small hub, a set of flexible arms fanning out from it, and a single tail cable leaving the hub for your power supply. What differs is the arms.
The copper wire build is the common one. Thirty to sixty hair-thin branches leave the hub, each carrying two to four separate LED beads — which is exactly where the advertised 120 and 200 LED counts come from. The wire is soft enough to bend by hand and stiff enough to hold whatever shape you bend it into, which is the real feature: the same light can be a starburst, a heart or a loose bouquet depending on how you set it.
The tube or bar build has fewer arms, each a continuous run of LEDs inside a flexible sleeve. Heavier, brighter per arm, and stiff enough to keep a curve without help.
Two things are true of both, and they drive the whole install:
- The hub is the electrical junction. Every arm is fed from it. It is also the only point where all the weight converges.
- Nothing about the arms is rigid. The shape you get is the shape you set. The difference is that wire branches hold their own shape once bent, while tube arms usually need holding at the far end.
How much wall do you need?
Measure one arm from the hub to its tip, then double it. That is the diameter of the circle the light will occupy when the arms are fanned out evenly.
People consistently underestimate this. On a desk it looks compact; on a wall it is usually wider than the monitor it sits above. Before you stick anything down, lay the light flat on the floor, fan the arms out the way you intend to hang them, and measure the actual spread. Then check that against the wall.
You do not have to fan the arms evenly. Narrowing the spread — pulling the arms into a half-fan or a tighter cluster — is a legitimate layout and is often the right answer for a narrow wall or an alcove. Nothing electrical changes.
Mounting: the hub carries the load
Fix the hub first, and fix it properly. It is carrying the combined weight of every arm plus the tail cable, and it is the one point that cannot be allowed to let go.
- Mark the hub position. Remember the light extends by one arm length in every direction from this point, and that the tail has to reach your outlet from here.
- Fix the hub. On plasterboard or a painted wall, use a fixing rated well above the light's weight. This is not the place to rely on adhesive alone.
- Fan the arms into position. Work opposite pairs — top and bottom, then left and right — so the hub is not pulled off-centre as you go.
- Set the shape. On a copper wire light this is the whole job: bend each branch and it stays put, no fixings at all. On a tube build the arms will relax, so a small tab at or near each tip holds the curve — it only has to hold shape, not weight.
- Route the tail last, once the shape is settled.
Where tabs are needed, we use small tape tabs on our own test wall — fine indoors and easy to reposition while you are still deciding on the shape. If the light is going up permanently, swap the tape for clips once you are happy with the layout, because tape adhesive relaxes over time, especially on a warm wall.
One thing worth knowing before you commit to a position: on a copper wire light, the shape is repositionable indefinitely. You can come back a month later and re-bend the whole thing without touching a single fixing. That is not true of the tube build, where every change means peeling and re-siting tabs.
Where the tail goes
The tail leaves the hub as a single cable and has to reach power. Two things to check before you commit to a hub position:
- Reach. Measure from the intended hub position to the outlet along the route the cable will actually take — down the wall, along a skirting board, behind furniture — not in a straight line.
- Where it will be visible. The tail drops straight down from the hub. If the light is centred above a desk or a bed, that drop lands in the middle of the wall. Plan whether it runs behind something or gets a cable channel.
What the effects actually look like
These are effect previews from our own control app — the patterns the controller drives a firework light through. They are also the reason fan spacing matters: an effect that travels outward from the hub reads clearly on an even fan and turns to mush on a crowded one.
These are the app's own effect previews rather than photographs of a wall. In a room the same effect looks softer, and the bars nearest the hub always read brighter because their light overlaps.
App control, and what a cheap one does instead
Worth separating two products that share a name. A great many firework lights are not app-controlled at all: they run a fixed set of eight modes from a small handheld remote, powered by batteries or a solar panel, and that is the entire feature set. Nothing wrong with them — but no app will ever connect to one, and a good deal of "it will not pair" traffic is people trying.
Our app-controlled versions use addressable arms, which means each arm can show several colours at once and effects can travel outward from the hub. That behaviour needs Magic Lantern, our app for addressable lighting.
If you install a general RGB app instead, the light may connect and respond to brightness and solid colours while none of the radial effects work — which reads like a faulty light but is only the wrong app.
Taking one outdoors
The arms themselves are the durable part. The vulnerable points are the joints, and there are far more of them here than on a plain strip: every arm meets the hub at a connection, and the tail leaves through another. On a copper wire light with fifty branches, that is fifty joints inside one small hub.
Water does not usually attack the LEDs directly. It gets into a joint, wicks along the inside of the sleeve, and corrodes a contact somewhere you cannot see. The failure shows up later as one dead arm, or an arm stuck on one colour, while everything else still works.
Two ratings, not one. On battery and solar models the lights and the control box are usually rated separately — the box is the weaker of the two, and it is the part that has to be positioned thoughtfully. Check both figures rather than the headline one, and site the box where it drains and stays out of standing water.
So if the light is going outside:
- Mount the hub so it drains. Any hub sitting where water can pool around it will eventually take water into the joints, whatever it is rated for.
- Point the tail exit downward so water runs away from the opening rather than into it.
- Keep the power connection indoors or in an enclosure. The strip-to-cable joint is the most common entry point.
- Check the rating of the specific model you bought. Not every firework light in the range is built for permanent outdoor exposure, and a version intended for a covered porch is not the same as one for an open wall.
Common questions
One arm is dead and the rest are fine
That points at that arm's connection to the hub rather than at the arm itself. On an addressable light, check whether the arms after it in the chain still work — that distinction tells you whether the problem is power or data. On a copper wire light, a single dead branch out of fifty is barely visible once the light is fanned, which is a genuine advantage of that build.
Can I shorten the arms?
Copper wire: no. The beads sit at fixed points along a continuous pair of conductors, there are no cut marks, and cutting kills the branch. If a wire light is too big for the space, bend the branches back on themselves — a tighter, denser ball is a normal layout and loses nothing.
Tube or bar: check the specific model. Addressable arms can only be cut at defined points, and a cut in the wrong place takes out everything downstream of it. If there are no marked cut points, treat it as not cuttable.
Can I mount it on a ceiling?
Mechanically yes, and the fan looks good overhead — but the hub fixing now carries the full weight in shear, and the tail hangs rather than resting against a wall. Fix the hub into something structural, not into plasterboard alone.
Why does the middle look brighter than the tips?
Near the hub the arms are close together, so light from neighbouring arms overlaps. It is a spacing effect, not a fault. Widening the fan evens it out — and on a wire light with two to four beads per branch, the effect is pronounced because the beads themselves are spaced further apart toward the tips.